Tuesday, September 4, 2007

I suppose it was only a matter of time- potato chips coated in caffeine! A 3 ½ oz bag of NRG Phoenix Furry Potato Chips provides the equivalent of 3 ½ big cups of brewed coffee, so a conservative estimate of caffeine content is 473 mg in their largest size of chips. How does that compare to other caffeinated products? Eight ounces of brewed coffee clocks in at 135 mg/serving; Lipton Tea at 35-40 mg per 8 oz; Mountain Dew at 55.5 for 12oz; 1.5 oz Hershey Bar contains 10 mg of caffeine.

A one ounce serving of these chips contains 9 grams of fat so the 3 ½ oz chip size contains 31.5 grams of fat. So, 3 ½ oz later, you get 473 mg of caffeine and 31.5 grams of fat. The makers of this chip claim their target groups are those individuals who do not like the taste of energy drinks and would prefer a crunchy snack instead. According to the article, someone already makes a caffeine-infused yogurt so that particular market has already been cornered.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Red yeast rice is a fermented rice common in both Japan and China. It is eaten for basic nutritional benefits and also functions as an herbal supplement. In the West, red yeast rice is popular as a natural cholesterol reducing agent, as it contains a naturally-occurring compound called mevinolin, also known as lovastatin[1]. On August 9th, the FDA put out a warning that red yeast rice “may contain an unauthorized drug” and should not be consumed. The unauthorized drug? Lovastatin. Red yeast rice has been know for years to contain lovastatin, but now it is an “unauthorized drug”? What in the world is going on?

Friday, August 10, 2007

On July 26th the New York Times published an article claiming that “obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus.” The central concept is that if a person’s friends and family are obese, that person is more likely to be so as well. But is this viral? Is obesity a viral disease that spreads from person to person, infecting the whole lot? Or is this simply virus-like behavior? The concept of viral marketing has been around for ages in the tomes of science fiction literature and for all I know, they have a viral marketing 101 class at university. Viral marketing is the simple concept is that if you can get one person to start a trend, such as wearing a red bandana, they will pass on this behavior to their friends and their friend’s friends until everyone is wearing a red bandana. This works particularly well in the marketing of new, improved diet foods that really, really work.

Obesity has always been partially a product of cultural norms and personal exposures. If an entire social circle consumes multiple homemade pies and cakes in one sitting and shuns exercise because they do not like to sweat, that group of people is more likely to be obese than a group whose norm it is to go mountain biking and then finish the day with grilled chicken and salad. As family counseling demonstrates, it is extremely difficult to change group dynamics. One person in the dessert eating group shunning grandma’s German Chocolate Cake for weight loss reasons will be viewed as a threat to the entire circle and pressure will be put on that person to fall back into line. Obesity obviously has strong ties to cultural conditioning but is this really viral behavior or just a new, fancy term to make it sound like a contagious disease, further ostracizing overweight individuals?

On July 26th the New York Times published an article claiming that “obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus.” The central concept is that if a person’s friends and family are obese, that person is more likely to be so as well. But is this viral? Is obesity a viral disease that spreads from person to person, infecting the whole lot? Or is this simply virus-like behavior? The concept of viral marketing has been around for ages in the tomes of science fiction literature and for all I know, they have a viral marketing 101 class at university. Viral marketing is the simple concept is that if you can get one person to start a trend, such as wearing a red bandana, they will pass on this behavior to their friends and their friend’s friends until everyone is wearing a red bandana. This works particularly well in the marketing of new, improved diet foods that really, really work.

Obesity has always been partially a product of cultural norms and personal exposures. If an entire social circle consumes multiple homemade pies and cakes in one sitting and shuns exercise because they do not like to sweat, that group of people is more likely to be obese than a group whose norm it is to go mountain biking and then finish the day with grilled chicken and salad. As family counseling demonstrates, it is extremely difficult to change group dynamics. One person in the dessert eating group shunning grandma’s German Chocolate Cake for weight loss reasons will be viewed as a threat to the entire circle and pressure will be put on that person to fall back into line. Obesity obviously has strong ties to cultural conditioning but is this really viral behavior or just a new, fancy term to make it sound like a contagious disease, further ostracizing overweight individuals?

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

What components of this meal are local? It looks like mush but this is my successful attempt at a multi-course Indian meal and that’s saying something considering I’m a very white American with comparatively little culinary experience. On the left is chicken tikka masala and then spiced spinach, fresh carrot salad, and homemade naan garnished with a fabulous local heirloom tomato.

Why do I care if any part of this meal is local? “Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles” and on average, every kilocalorie we consume takes 87 kilocalories to produce in oil (1). Fossil fuels are an inelastic, expensive resource whose use results in the pollution of the very water and fields we depend upon to produce food. Second, by purchasing foods from 1500 miles away or more, our money is leaving the local farmers and merchants without income. Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” illustrated what happens to a town when the local industry dries up and blows away and much the same thing occurs when all the money is leaving the town to procure goods and very little is making it’s way back home. Without money circulating locally, the diverse mom and pop shops can no longer afford to operate, tightening the noose of shopping choices down to large corporate-run stores with generally poor ecological, manufacturing, and human rights practices. Buying local food allows the consumer to use their substantial buying power to support their neighbors and sustainable production techniques.

Local food also tastes better. No, no really. It’s such a little thing but local food is seasonal food, meaning that it’s picked at it’s natural prime. We’ve all experienced mealy winter tomatoes from South America but have we ever asked ourselves why we suffer so? Barbara Kingsolver eloquently says it best: “Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of it’s former self.” You’d think we cared more about the idea of what we’re eating than about what we’re eating(1) .”

Do we eat it simply because we can? Or perhaps we eat it because the USDA as told us to? Well before I discovered the concept of “local eating” I only consumed fresh berries and stone fruit when it was ripe locally because peaches imported from California in December are not peaches at all. But what about romaine lettuce and zucchini and cucumber? How will I get my “5 a day” in February if I don’t eat California produce? These are difficult, very personal questions that can only be answered by individuals based on time and inconvenience, given our dependence on “convenience” foods. Given time, every one of us could put up all the frozen, canned, and dried produce it would take to make it through the winter and then all it would take is will power to withstand the lusty call of tomatoes in January. But most of us don’t have the time or unwilling to make the time so instead of throwing the concept of “eating local” out the window with the Thigh Master, we can do what we can with the resources we possess. Perhaps it means going to the Farmer’s market a few times throughout the summer to enjoy truly ripe peaches. Maybe it means freezing pound upon pound of only green beans or making two types of jam. Or it could mean driving to a farm once a month to procure meat and cheese. Whatever level of local eating each individual can achieve is a step in the right direction and something is always better than nothing.

So, what parts of the meal are local? None of the spices except for the garlic, and there were many, many spices. The ginger is from Hawaii. The chicken is from California, as is the yogurt. The spinach, carrots and cilantro are from the farmer’s market but the flour, eggs, rice and butter are from the far reaches of the country. The milk and cream are from Organic Valley, a consortium of dairy farmers that are supposedly local but send their wares to a common processing plant but the according to the package, the distribution center is in Wisconsin. Not a very local meal at all but I am giving it a fare amount of consideration and trying to figure out ways to do better. There is a dairy several mile south of my home but it is not organic so I need to look into their feeding and antibiotic practices before I purchase. The process seems overwhelming but focus on one nut at a time (har har) and we will all get there.

As a nutrition student I think about food, read about food and talk about food quite a bit and one conclusion I’ve reached is that the food culture in the great US of A is profoundly disturbed. For all of human history and well into the 20th century human lives revolved around the acquisition and preparation of food. Food was the center-piece of survival, even trumping clothing, shelter, and procreation, for without food, women cannot bear children. And then, like magic, the industrialization and ago-business of the 20th century make calories so available that rather than fighting starvation as we have done since time began, we are suddenly faced with an obesity epidemic that we are woefully unprepared mentally and physiologically to deal with.

With industrialization and globalization of the food supply food, nourishment went from the center-piece of human existence to the periphery without a second thought. The current expectation regarding food is that it is to be quick, cheap and here. It should require very little energy to procure and prepare and instead of costing the most, it should be the least expensive of all the necessary survival requirements. Food is life, yet we give it the attention of an annoying knat.

The entire country has been hoodwinked into thinking that food is cheap and easy, when in reality, is it neither. It costs money to grow and distribute food, and the damaged sustained by the environment with the pollution of having plums from Chile in the middle of winter is irreparable. Only with government subsidies to the corn, soy, wheat and rice does our “food” remain so cheap that American balk at paying reasonable prices for fresh, nourishing produce. And this, in a nutshell, is the origin food movements to eat locally and sustainably, so more money goes back into the local economy and local farmers.